Government Shutdown

The Shutdown: At Least It Doesn't Affect Happy Hour

As though you needed another reason to despise politicians, starting today the federal government is shutting down for the first time in 17 years due to budgetary indecision. This may not come as news to you (given the superfluous 3D graphics being churned out by 24-hour news networks), and you probably won’t see many immediate effects unless you work in the D.C. area as either government personnel or a contractor. Still, the fact remains that our legislative system never tires of finding new and inventive ways of being a grand comedy of errors.

The crux of the issue lies with Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and specifically the provision that requires all Americans to procure (one way or another) health insurance, lest they be penalized in the form of a tax. Because the word “tax” makes far-right Republicans reflexively vomit, the party refused to pass a Continuing Resolution unless Democrats agreed to table the individual mandate portion of the act for further review. In order to add more bite to their bark, they also included a provision that stated that, should the ACA go forward as-is, congressional staffers and aides would lose federal health insurance subsidies, effectively cutting their own pay and the pay of their employees. The Democrats refused all proposed iterations of the bill, and this entire fiasco is a wonderful example of why neither party really gives two sh*ts about you or me as people.

In a way, we elect our representatives to do exactly what they’re doing: To stand up and fight for our interests, regardless of whether or not we have a chance of winning. If you live in a Republican district and follow the party line of being opposed to the ACA, you entrust your representative to exhaust all options in fighting its passage. On the other hand, if you have a Democratic representative, you’re likely frustrated by the right’s repeated attempts to thwart, despite no one having a firm grasp on what it is and how it works, the most comprehensive reform to our healthcare system in recent memory.

That’s all well and good, but at a more macro level, regardless of partisan affiliation, we all pay our legislature to do one thing — keep their constituents’ best interests at heart. Something tells me that shutting down the government (including the legislature) and forcing hundreds of thousands of people (more, if you count contractors) to take leave without pay is in no one’s best interest. And all this comes just 17 days before Congress must meet to “discuss” (I use that term lightly) the much more serious issue of raising the debt ceiling.

It’s neatly definitive proof that just about every politician out there is a self-serving glory chaser who cares much more about their win/loss ratio than serving the public interest, like a District Attorney on a fictional legal melodrama. On the one hand, you have the Republicans, who are directed by people so knee-jerk in their conservatism that they won’t even consider giving something progressive a chance, despite no one really knowing what the far-reaching effects will be. On the other, you have Democrats who are so smug in their self-righteousness and moral/intellectual superiority that the idea of even discussing compromise in the interest of avoiding catastrophe is beneath them. It’s less about the actual semantics of the issue and more about the principle of screwing over the other side simply because you don’t like them. The Republicans could have introduced a provision that, should they get their way on this one thing, they’d relinquish control of the house to the Democrats for the next 20 years, and the Democrats would reject it because it wasn’t their idea. The exact same is true on the other side. This shouldn’t be American politics. This is schoolyard politics, more akin to gang warfare than anything productive.